“What do you mean?” I said. My heart didn’t pound as hard this time. There are only so many times you can deal with about-to-be-found-out shock before you either die or adapt.
“Ms. Class President,” Myra said, smirking at me.
Thankfully, I bit my tongue before I said, “Really?” From what I knew of Jessie Morgan, she didn’t seem like the class-president type. I didn’t say anything. I just smiled.
“Just think,” Heather said. “If Robert Pierce had done his platform speech while wearing a spandex miniskirt and a tube top, he’d be here making crepe-paper bows instead.” She finished a bow that was only slightly better than mine. “Remember your red patent-leather stilettos? I still don’t know how you could walk in those things.”
“God,” I said, cringing at the idea of some little tart winning a high school election that way. “I can’t believe—I can’t believe I did that!”
“Yeah,” Myra said. “And you got all the glory while I did all the grunt work. That’s why we’re having a thirteen-year reunion, by the way. It’s your fault. Everyone waited for you to emerge from the ether to plan the ten-year, and it never happened.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Hey,” Myra said, “homecoming dance, winter formal, and prom. I learned how to make a mean crepe-paper bow.” She seemed a little annoyed, but then she looked at me and her face softened. “And, you know, we don’t love you because you’ve always been a straight arrow. Plus I’m sure we’re all way more interesting now than we were three years ago anyway.” She scrunched up her face like she was being super serious and handed me a bow. “Go hang it somewhere. Do your job, Madam President.” She laughed.
I hung bows around the stage with rolled-up strips of tape. I watched Myra and Heather as I worked. Myra stuck a bow in Heather’s hair. Heather crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out.
“You look lovely, darling, don’t you?” Myra said, in a terrible British accent.
“Yes, yes,” Heather said, sticking a bow on Myra’s head too. “And you look simply smashing. Jessie, do be a dear and come look ridiculous with us, will you?”
“But of course,” I said, and jogged across the room to join them.
When we finished the bows, we moved on to name tags. Myra had cards made up with everyone’s high school yearbook pictures on them, but we had to get them in plastic sleeves and set them up in alphabetical order on the table by the door.
Myra handed me a card for Jessie. “I made this one on my computer this morning. I figure if we have to wear dorky name tags, you do too.”
“Ha!” Heather said, holding one of the cards to her chest to hide it from us. “Brad Wilson. Do you remember how cool we thought he was?”
I smiled and nodded.
Myra held the back of her hand to her forehead, like she was swooning.
“And, here it is,” Heather said, turning the tag out to face us.
Brad Wilson was a scrawny little baby of a kid with hockey hair.
Myra laughed so hard that actual tears rolled down her cheeks. “We wasted our youth mooning over a guy with a mullet!”
We stayed up way later than we should have, playing “cool or not cool?” with the name tags until well after midnight.
Myra yawned, and then Heather and I followed. “You know,” Heather said, “if I stay any later, I’m going to be too tired to drive.”
“Yeah,” Myra said, stretching out her arms and yawning again. “We should get going.”
“I’m just going to run to the ladies’ and then I’m good to go,” Heather said, and did a quick little jog for the door.
“You know,” Myra said, laying her head on her arm to look at me. “You could stay with me next week.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t—”
“You told me you were going to spend next week with Deagan. You already have the time off.”
“I mean, I should really—”
“Seriously, Jess,” she said, sitting up and reaching for her purse. “You should really stay.”
“I’m not sure everyone’s happy to have me here.”
“Fish, you mean?”
“Yeah,” I said, running my hand through my hair. I still wasn’t used to how short it was.
“I think he’ll warm up. He just needs a little time. You broke his heart.”
“Really?”
“God, Jess! Sometimes you can be so dense!” She laughed and smacked her palm to her forehead. “He told you he loved you after graduation, and you ran into the bathroom and then basically disappeared forever. You think maybe that might bruise a guy’s ego a little? Maybe? Possibly?”
I leaned on my elbows and covered my face with my hands. I didn’t know what to say, and I was feeling overwhelmed.
“Hey,” Myra said. She patted my arm. “He has to get it out of his system, you know? Make sure you know that he was hurt. He’ll warm up. I’ve watched him watching you when you’re not looking.”
“Really?”
“It’s Fish,” Myra said. “He has to watch you. It’s like what he was put on earth to do. Stay. Make up with him. After everything you guys went through, don’t leave without patching things up.”
“I have the trip all booked,” I said. “I’m not sure if it’s refundable.” I wasn’t going to stay at Myra’s house. That was a line too crazy to cross.
“Well, the offer is there,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand.
After Myra and Heather left, I wandered around the room, looking for Fish’s picture on the yearbook page posters. I didn’t even know what his real name was. Myra or Heather must have gotten his name tag.
I started at the beginning of the yearbook pictures and worked my way around the room until I found a picture I was sure was Fish. Gilbert Warren Foster. He was wearing a plaid shirt, open, over a Pearl Jam T-shirt, and even though he was blinking funny in the picture, I would have thought he was cool when I was in high school. I would have bought a Pearl Jam CD for an excuse to talk to him, and I might have even worked up the nerve to actually say something.
I found Robbie, who had massive aviator eyeglasses sliding halfway down his nose, a big warm smile, and the same deep dimples. I wouldn’t have recognized Heather if she’d had a nickname like Fish, but I could pick her out from the narrowed-down sea of Heathers. She was pudgy with mud-colored frizzy hair pulled into a side ponytail and fastened in place with a big white scrunchie. She wasn’t what anyone in high school would have thought of as pretty, but she had a hopeful smile and an awkward sweetness.
I’m sure if my face had been up there with everyone else’s, it would have had that same raw promise. We can’t see how beautiful it is when we’re young and nervous and think everyone else knows just how awful we feel about ourselves. I wasn’t that different from them. But what I never had is what was most beautiful about Fish and Heather and Myra and Robbie—they were people who were cared about. You could see it in their faces. You could still see it. They were secure in knowing they had friends. They were loved, and they always would be. I choked back tears.
I looked at Jessie Morgan’s picture again and wondered what kind of person would ever leave friends like these.
So, it turns out that you can’t just type “Jessica Elizabeth Morgan” into Google and expect to get the Jessica Elizabeth Morgan you’re looking for right up top, or even expect to find her in the first five hundred results. I know this, because instead of going to bed after a long night of mojitos and meeting Fish and decorating, I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning convinced that the next link I clicked would lead to her. And every time it didn’t, I’d say, “Okay, one more,” and hold out hope that the next one I clicked would show a picture of someone who looked like me, but with a bigger nose, or race stats from a 5K fundraiser and the woman mentioned woul
d be exactly Jessie Morgan’s age.
I knew she hadn’t gone to Florida State or the U of O, which I assumed meant Oregon. I wracked my brain to try to remember if Myra had mentioned any of the other schools Jessie applied to, but I didn’t think she had. And it’s not like I could have asked her, “Hey, so where did I apply to college?”
I looked on Facebook for Jessica Morgans who had gone to party schools. Someplace like Arizona or Southern California. Bikinis and sun and cute boys—a place to wear her tube top. But there wasn’t a single thirty-one-year-old Jessica Morgan who looked the slightest bit like me anywhere.
Then it occurred to me that maybe she wasn’t even Jessie Morgan anymore. Maybe she had a married name. Maybe she changed her name. Maybe there was a real reason Jessie left Mount Si and never came back. She dashed into a bathroom and then she disappeared. Maybe she was in the witness-protection program. The FBI or the CIA or whoever relocates witnesses let her walk at graduation and then swooped her away to be a dry cleaner in Lansing or a bartender in Kansas City. Maybe there was a good reason Myra had never been able to find her.
At around 4:00 a.m., the sheer stupidity and awfulness of what I was doing hit me. I started to sweat. My hands shook, and I couldn’t get enough air. I grabbed my inhaler and went outside to sit on the balcony, with the comforter wrapped around me, and listened to the rush of the falls as I tried to calm myself down.
I woke up a few hours later, in one of the patio chairs, with a crick in my neck and dew on my face, and was generally damp and creaky all around.
Thankfully when I got down to the conference, most of the other attendees looked like they’d had a pretty rough night. Kyle’s face was pale, and when he turned the projector on to do another PowerPoint, he winced as the light hit his face.
While Kyle talked about creating the right voice for a blog, I wrote down everything I knew about Jessie Morgan in my notebook, hoping that something would give me a clue about why she left and what I should do.
Boyfriend: Fish
Best friend: Myra
Class president—tube top?
Smoker
Slutty dresser
Fake green contact lenses
Got into trouble with Robbie all the time. What kind of trouble?
Went to the bathroom, never came back. Alligators in the sewer?
I made myself laugh out loud. Kyle looked in my direction. I covered my mouth and pretended to cough. When he looked away, I drew a big, toothy alligator on the page, and then a sewer pipe, and then the entire plumbing system of a high school and the route the alligator would take to grab Jessie Morgan and bring her down to his underground sewer-pipe lair, like a crocodilian Phantom of the Opera. Then I drew Jessie Morgan wearing a tube top and sitting in a gondola with an alligator dressed in a white half mask and a cape pushing them along the sewer with a pole.
I can’t say I heard a single word Kyle or Michael, the next presenter, said. In fact, I hadn’t even noticed when Michael switched places with Kyle, but at least it looked like I was taking notes.
When I finally did look up, the PowerPoint slide read, “Mistakes to avoid” in big letters across the screen. I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking Michael, who had hair like a salt-and-pepper helmet, which mistakes we should embrace.
The longer I stayed in PR, the less faith I had in the abilities of PR execs to actually communicate, and the less I wanted to be one. The main focus of my job was preparing for the launch of a forty-proof alcoholic energy drink called Ivolushun, which was being marketed specifically to college kids, steroid-happy gym rats, and hipsters who would hopefully find something ironic about it.
The week before I left for Seattle, we had a meeting with the Ivolushun brand coordinator, who came into the office wearing a slim-cut maroon suit and about three bottles of drugstore cologne, and said, with a straight face, “We’re not legally allowed to call it an energy drink, so the campaign needs to convey energy without actually using the words ‘energy,’ ‘energetic,’ or ‘energified,’” as if he actually believed “energified” was a word.
It was easier to think about Jessie Morgan than it was to question my entire career path, so I went back to my notebook and listed things I needed to learn about Jessie.
Find out where Jessie applied to college.
What would she have majored in?
How long did she date Fish?
WHY DID SHE LEAVE?
At lunch, when I should have been mingling and making great corporate connections, I grabbed a sandwich and snuck out to the reunion room to look at Jessie Morgan’s picture again. I hoped I’d find some clue about who she might be now, but there was nothing. Her senior quote was, “The only thing we have to fear is . . . spiders.” She was voted most likely to rob a bank. And she was supposedly in the photography club, but she wasn’t in the photography club picture.
I sat on the table, ate my sandwich, and stared at all the faces. I tried to come up with the equivalents from my high school. Roy Dillard would have been Michael St. James. Katie Lewis was a dead ringer for Mary Colby. Jake Wooster was—
“Hiding out?” I hadn’t even heard Kyle come in, but there he was. I blushed, hoping he hadn’t been there long. When I get caught up in my thoughts, I tend to make faces as if I were having a conversation with someone, even though it’s just me and I’m not saying anything out loud. Not an attractive habit.
“Taking a break,” I said, wiping my mouth to make sure I didn’t have any crumbs or mayo stuck to my lips.
“Rough night?
“Long one, at least,” I said.
“So did you go to high school here?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I said, for lack of a better answer. My brain was slow and fuzzy from staying up so late two nights in a row.
“Well, that’s why I asked.”
“Mmm.” I raised my eyebrows and smiled.
He stared at me like he wasn’t quite sure what to say next.
“How about you,” I said. “Did you have a rough night?”
“Oh,” he said, rubbing his head, “it was a great night. It’s the morning that got rough.”
“That’s usually how it goes,” I said, even though I was the kind of girl who was in bed by eleven more often than not. He didn’t have to know.
“So,” Kyle said, pointing at all the pictures on the walls. “If I look, will I find you up here?”
I shrugged.
He walked over and leaned against the table where I was sitting and flashed me that purposefully shy smile again. “Think you’ll come out with us tonight?”
“That remains to be seen,” I said, and picked a slice of onion out of my sandwich.
It’s funny, because I pretty much threw myself at Deagan. Once he showed the slightest bit of interest in me, I jumped in and did all the rest of the work. I invited him places and schemed and tried so hard to get him to like me. But withholding the most inconsequential bits of information from Kyle seemed to be driving him crazy.
“You know,” he said, “it’s good team building. Going out with the group. You’ll make some connections.”
“Huh,” I said, laughing, “is that what they’re calling it these days?”
“Oh,” he said, holding his hand to his chest, in a gesture of mock seriousness. “You think I’m hitting on you?”
“You are,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got you figured out.” I don’t know where the confidence was coming from. It was like Jessie Morgan had taken over my brain in some kind of bad body-swap movie. Or maybe I was too tired or too caught up in the Jessie drama to care.
“You do?” Kyle said.
“Maybe.” It was stupid, the way I was playing with him. I wasn’t really interested. I liked feeling like I had power. Like if I wanted to, I could get a guy like Deagan to th
row himself all over me. It didn’t fix anything, but it made me feel better.
“Well, if we don’t catch you in the lobby tonight, we’re headed to a place called Finaghty’s in Snoqualmie.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“Just say yes,” he said. “Come with us.”
“We’ll see.”
He smiled and shook his head at me. “Well, I should head back in. Michael is starting up again in five minutes. Don’t be late. I’ll give you detention.”
“If I’m late,” I called after him, “I’ll make sure I have a hall pass.”
I was the last one back to the conference room, and a girl named Stacy, from San Diego, had taken my seat up front, across from Kyle. Mostly, I think, she sat there so she could force Kyle to pay attention to the way her boobs erupted from a black satin pushup bra, straining the buttons of her thin white shirt.
I sat at the far end of the table, opened my notebook, and wrote.
Afraid of spiders
Photography club
When I looked up, Kyle was watching me. He smiled when my eyes met his.
I added some torches to my alligator drawing.
“So, I’ll see you later,” Kyle said, when the lecture ended and everyone was filing out of the conference room.
He was so cocky. Like he knew he could have me if he wanted me. And I hated to admit it, but if I went out with them, he probably could. Because I liked feeling chosen. I liked that even though Stacy had her cleavage on full display, Kyle was looking at me. Kyle was asking me to come out with him, and that was exactly why I couldn’t go. I couldn’t be that girl anymore—the one who waited to be chosen. I was sure Jessie Morgan never waited around for anyone to choose her.
I went to my ten-year high school reunion. It was about two months before I met Deagan. I got brave and asked this guy, Noah, who I worked with, to go with me. Kind of like a friend thing, except I liked him and I guess he didn’t know that. He met some girl at a nightclub the weekend before, and they did that annoying thing where they started acting like they were totally in love immediately. He told me she was jealous of me, “Even though we’re just friends.” So at the last minute I ended up dateless.
Why Can't I Be You (9781101602843) Page 10